Cooperative Games Over Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Self-Sufficient Energy Communities

Abstract

The household prosumers’ decentralized cooperation and aggregation in energy communities are essential to increase renewable energy penetration and to ensure a successful energy transition. Despite their potential, the prosumers are not motivated to participate in local energy value chains due to the lack of trust and decentralized cooperation models for meeting community welfare and sustainability preferences, most innovation efforts being focused on financial incentives that are anyway very low. In this paper, we propose a solution for prosumers’ decentralized coordination in self-sufficient energy communities using cooperative games on top of a blockchain overlay that considers their complementary energy features and flexibility mobilization. The proposed model for community-level local energy balance fits well in circumstances in which there is a strong motivation in the community to prioritize sustainability and environmental concerns and reduce dependence on external energy. We define a governance model to support the decentralized self-organization of prosumers in coalitions for balancing the renewable generation and demand while considering via tokenization factors that go beyond purely economic motivations and foster cooperation and collaboration among the prosumers in the community. Self-enforcing contracts are used to implement the cooperative game model enabling the decentralized management of prosumers’ coalitions for optimized tokens-based payoff distribution towards self-sufficiency. The evaluation results show our solution’s effectiveness in facilitating the prosumers cooperation in self-sufficient coalitions achieving a minimal difference between the energy consumption and production in the community of approximately 0.01%, with a low transactional time overhead.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• cooperative games
• self-sufficient energy communities
• small scale prosumers
• renewable energy integration